Greasy Food in the Big City

The 25 kilometer marker on the road to Ouahigouya.



My host family's bar in Ouahigouya, Nabons Wende (Ask of God). Host brothers Soumaila and Salam in front.



The best part about going to the city is the food. In village, if you eat with the neighbors, it’s tô every day- the millet paté served with a variety of disgusting sauces, depending on what’s in season. Usually the sauce is based on a wild or cultivated leaf, like baobab, oseille, or bean leaves. Sometimes it’s a fruit or grain- okra, peanut, or sesame. Frequently, an unidentified ingredient is added that changes the consistency of the sauce to that of bacteria thickened snot, that drips off your fingers and forms vertical bridges stretching from the bowl all the way to your mouth. It’s not that bad, actually. You get used to it.

There’s a couple of road side restaurants in village that serve rice and sauce, meat soup, fish, yams, ground manioc, or spaghetti, depending on the day. When you get sick of all that, though, it’s time to hop on the bike and make the trip into Ouahigouya, about an hour and a half ride at 27k away.

The latest census put Ouahigouya at 60,000 people, fourth largest city in Burkina. It’s the capital of the province of Yatenga as well as the region of the North, encompassing several other provinces as well. A number of government headquarters and resources can be visited: Ministries of agriculture and environment, hospitals, a police station and military base, the sports stadium. There are also foreign financed, non-governmental agencies, tackling the usual enemies such as poverty, AIDS, desertification, and so on. Nearly every building, public and private, is on the electric grid, but very few, excepting the headquarters and organizations just cited, have indoor plumbing. Communal spigots and foot pumps supply the rest of the city with water.

Ouahigouya also has the distinction of being the vulture capital of West Africa; everywhere you look the ugly, bald headed birds are flying, hopping, perching. I don’t think the human or animal mortality rate is any more pronounced here than over the rest of the country, so why the vultures pick this particular city to haunt is a mystery- but there it is.

With the possible exception of baleen whales, which don’t even open their mouths to eat, these vultures may have the least strenuous life in the entire animal kingdom. They barely even flap their wings to fly, instead soaring for hours on end on the prevailing wind currents. Edward Abbey suggests that they’re sleeping up there. They don’t need to hunt for food, but just happily indulge in whatever the reaper provides. I suppose it’s all a trade off for being cursed with a wrinkly, bald head that you have to stick inside a rotting carcass to get a meal. . .

Right. I was talking about food. There are hundreds of places to eat, from women selling rice on the side of the road, to full fledged restaurants serving French fries and salad, even a hotel that serves hamburgers next to a swimming pool! Among all the options, of course, you start to choose your favorites.

The first stop is a small breakfast shack not long after the dirt road from village meets city pavement. An egg sandwich with a big bowl of yogurt costs just over a dollar. If you need a jolt, there’s coffee- instant Nescafe with three or four sugar cubes- or café au lait, the same Nescafe with a generous portion of sweetened condensed milk, a thick, white, gooey substance which turns the experience into something like drinking a candy bar for breakfast.

For lunch, it’s Madame Coulibaly’s, an unassuming sandwich shop on the other side of town. We discovered it because she was the host mother to one of the volunteers during training, and we’ve been coming back ever since. Mix and match filet, avocado, hard boiled egg, and sausage in a baguette with vegetables and mayonnaise, although a few unfortunate times she’s been out of everything, except liver. Wash it down with some traditional Burkinabe beverages- bisap, a sweet purple drink made from a local flower, or zoom-koom, literally flour water, made from millet flour with tamarind juice added to give it some zing.

Then there’s shopping to be done, at mini grocery stores that sell things like Blue Band margarine and Vache Qui Rit cheese product, unavailable in village but necessary for favorite meals like mac n cheese. Exciting, as well, is the vegetable market, especially come the rainy season when all that’s sold in village are moldy onions and rotten tomatoes, if you’re lucky. Ouahigouya, though, keeps a good selection year round, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, garlic, eggplant, onions and tomatoes of the edible sort, and more. In certain seasons, too, potatoes are abundant, and provide a third response to the question, when I cook for myself, of what to make, spaghetti or macaroni? Rice would be another option but being the main food available at village restaurants I don’t bother fixing it for myself.

With all the varied possibilities back in the city, for dinner we keep coming back to the same place: Sol Beni, a restaurant right in the heart of the city. They’ve got it all- outdoor seating, Christmas tree lights strung about, and a sound system that plays all the classics: Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Bryan Adams. The restaurant itself is not much to speak of, although they do have good fries, and more importantly, cold beer. We have a gas powered fridge in village that does a reasonable job keeping the beer cold in the cold season, but in the hot season it just isn’t up to the task, and lukewarm is about all you can hope for. In the city, though, the fridge plugs into the wall, and bottles are served, sometimes, coated with ice.

No, the real draw of Sol Beni, aside from cold beer, is the location. Less than a block away is a kebob vendor, a salad lady, and a chicken guy. The kebobs, called brochettes, are filet coated in a spicy mustard sauce, though sometimes he runs out of meat and is left with only . . . liver. The salad lady chops up lettuce, tomato, onion, and cucumber and tosses it all together with an oil and vinegar dressing. But best of all is the chicken guy.

The chickens are butchered, put in a paper bag with lots of onions and lots of oil, and grilled over an old oil barrel. He serves them like that, chicken in a bag, the paper inside a plastic one to keep too much oil from spilling out. You wash your hands with a plastic tea kettle and dig in, seeking out the best pieces, and dipping them in the spicy pepper powder before eating. Everything is a greasy mess, your hands, your mouth, mustache, the table, but it’s a delicious greasy mess. The grease is so good, even after the last piece of chicken and last slice of onion have been devoured, we rub our fingers around the saturated paper bag to sop up every last remnant. Even the realization, came to after a year of eating there, that the paper bags in which the chickens are cooked and served are old cement bags, and probably cleaned none too thoroughly beforehand, wasn’t enough to stop us. What’s a little cement dust, anyway, when you could be sitting in village, eating slimy tô sauce with warm beer?